Blog Work

I wanted to mention a few things I was thinking of / plan to do on the blogs, to invite comments / suggestions.

  • The /main interface…
    • Should be the main page. I’m hoping this will be easy to accomplish. (WP makes heavy use of mod_rewrite, something I haven’t used before.)
    • Should truncate posts at some reasonable length.
    • Should show the blog something was posted to, not the author of the blog.
      • This is more of a pedantic thing, but it’s correct.
      • I have this and /meta, a blog about the blog. Both show up as “n1zyy”
  • The timezone seems seriously screwed up?
  • Some of the templates need work
    • A few (nonzero, featured on Andrew’s site, in particular) have all sorts of random crap in them, such as ads / strangers’ Flickr galleries. These need to be removed.
  • home.php doesn’t exist, which results in errors beings spewed everywhere
    • I wonder if I can just touch it.
  • I really, really need some caching going on here
  • Should I import all the old posts?
    • Part of the problem is that there are lots of lingering links to exact pages. WP uses a new URL format, so even if I import everything, old links will be broken.
      • This would help spur people to remove ancient links?
    • I haven’t really had anyone ask. I don’t want to go importing someone else’s old content to my website if that person doesn’t want me to.
    • Many of the people haven’t yet indicated any interest in renewed activity here.
  • I want to play a bit with the concept of shared categories; e.g., we could have a “Computers” category at, say, /computers, where posts by any of us with the the category of “Computers” would show up.
    • This would be somewhat of a pain, as each of us has our own list of categories.
      • Coding around it is entirely possible, but would require multiple levels of queries… Which is fine if people are interested, which is what I’m wondering

    Oh, and one more–doing ordered lists in the “Visual” composer is really screwed up. I keep having to fix it in the Code view. But that’s one for the WP devs, not me.

    7 thoughts on “Blog Work

    1. Let’s use this as a sort of list of bugs….

      I forgot:
      * Newlines are mysteriously missing from most peoples’ posts on the main page. Mr. T’s seem fine. I suspect it has to do with the way it’s getting submitted, and fixing it may be as simple as using a little nl2br() magic. (Wait, is that PHP or Perl?)

      * There are occasionally bizarre ASCII characters on the main page that don’t show up anywhere else. I again suspect that a simple PHP function might fix these, although I’m more curious about what’s causing that.

    2. I am writing and posting using Word 2007 most of the time. I wonder if that is why mine are working. I’ll try posting something directly from the web interface when I get a chance.

    3. I’m sure it’s got something to do with that. What I should really do is look directly in the database and see how yours are being formatted.

      Out of curiosity, are you just using Word to compose messages, or are you truly posting from Word? (Also out of curiosity, why is there a “u” in curious but not in curiosity? I suppose it almost makes sense given pronunciation, but it screws me up every time.)

    4. I am posting directly from Word. There is a blog document type. One can enter login information for multiple blogs (which I have done) and that indormation is saved. Once you have composed your blog there is a publish button on the menu ribbon. It is very cool and very easy to use.

    5. My .02: it’d be nice to have a link from a post to login _and return to the same post_. It’s annoying to login, be redirected to the admin, and have to find your way back. (Unless I’m missing something?)

    6. @Mr. T.: That’s pretty spiffy. I didn’t play with Word enough to find that yet. (Although really GUIs to a website aren’t my cup of tea, but it’s a neat concept at least.)

      @@: I see your point, but I’ve always been able to just hit ‘Back’ twice and get to the page. I suppose it’d be possible to add on, but I’d rather work on fixing the bugs in the stuff I wrote before I go mucking around with the WP code. 😉

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